


But Forever

by auselysium



Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017), Call Me by Your Name - André Aciman
Genre: Abstract, M/M, Post canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-25
Updated: 2019-02-25
Packaged: 2019-11-05 15:57:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17921900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/auselysium/pseuds/auselysium
Summary: I suppose it should feel stranger. His wife. My lover.Elio and Oliver meet up after Oliver's return to B.  Things have never been clearer.





	But Forever

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ChunkMonk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChunkMonk/gifts).



> Written in an hour. Trying to get the iron/dust off my writing. So forgive the abstract weirdness! 
> 
> For @rainbowdazzle. Based off her prompt, which I kind of didn't follow exactly. SORRY! :( "Elio and his boyfriend have an awkward run in with Oliver and his wife after a few years of silence. Both men are trying to make things work with their partners, to varying degrees of success, but the chance encounter reawakens long buried feelings between the men. Ends on a hopeful note, this is not the end for them, their futures are entwined and their current relationships doomed, and they know it."

“It’s been ages since I’ve seen her laugh like this.”

I suppose it should feel stranger. His wife. My lover. Their heads tilted close in the candle-lit restaurant, each with one hand supporting the leather-bound wine list as they pick out another bottle of something that none of us need really need by this point of the evening.

With the plates cleared, he’d needed to check his messages. A call coming from his publisher overseas, evidently. I’d suddenly needed a piss. Convenient that the payphone and the gents are side-by-side.

We hang back in the hallway near the kitchen, shoulders braced on opposite walls.

Their conversation is wordless from this distance, distilled to high pitched arcs that land with giddy laughs and playful taps to the shoulder. The instant camaraderie of two strangers getting along for their partners sake, oblivious and faultless pawns to a much longer story.

I cross my arms, the skin sliding warm across the cashmere of my sweater. His head tilts, sensing the movement. Envying it, even. I clear my throat and his eyes, long on me, jump back to the table.

“Well, he is a charmer,” I finally reply. And young and ambitious and heartless, on occasion, and pulling away from his older partner who is keeping something from him, he just knows it. I try cast a look of fondness out into the restaurant, but by my side, I already know the falsity in the creases of my eyes is being easily decoded. I look to check and he laughs, perfunctory and smug.

“All of our friends are getting divorced, these days. Kids leave for college and then, poof,” he’d said only a few months before. Summer. B. His fingers delicately balancing a joint in the moonlight of the arbor like they hadn’t forgotten how over the past twenty years.

“It’s almost like a two-for-one deal. Jimmy heads to State U and someone gets a new place on their own.”

I hadn’t asked. Hadn’t needed to.

“My eldest still had one more year of high school left,” he’d said, leaning farther across the table than needed to pass the joint me.

My heart had pounded in my head, high and undeniable. Driving a boldness through my veins that encouraged to me to kiss both his cheeks that night on our balcony. How very European of me. One kiss to feel the heat of his skin against mine. The second to linger, along with my hand on his shoulder.

“Night,” I’d said and turned to leave.

“Night,” he’d gasped. The line that had existed that summer - the one I’d felt certain would have been reformed by so much time - had been obliterated to dust.

This evening had been planned with similarly oblique precision as this summer had: excuses and happenstance and the urgency to condense the space between time to nothing.

The blood in my veins runs steady-cool, now, with the proof our little show and tell has given. He’ll show me his if I show him mine. All of life’s objectionable imperfections.

All but his long looks while the other two had gabbed on - not icy or shy, but ageless, and belonging to me alone.

His hand falls to my shoulder. “We should do this again soon,” he says. It looks and sounds chummy, if not for the parallel placement, the delicate caress of his fingers through the fabric to my skin.

I agree with a nod and he heads back to the table.  I smile, imagining the well coordinated pretense this next meeting will take.

_We._

Two not four.

Us, but not them.

Not now, but forever.


End file.
